The Reversion That Wasn’t

  The Reversion That Wasn’t

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

How Government Paid GY$400 Million for a Bridge It Was Owed for Free

On September 12, 2026, the Official Gazette carried a notice few Guyanese will have read past the headline. Berbice Bridge Company Inc. Secretary Amarnauth Singh disclosed that the company’s members had passed a special resolution on August 21 to wind up the concessionaire. Nine days later, chartered accountant Raan Motilall was named liquidator. On Wednesday, former board chairman Paul Cheong confirmed to Demerara Waves what the paperwork had already signaled: the bridge was handed to government, and government paid GY$400 million for it.

The number deserves more scrutiny than a single confirming quote from a former chairman. This board has examined the origin of that figure, the process — or absence of one — by which it was reached, and the twenty-year record of a company whose relationship with the Guyanese state has never once been a simple story of infrastructure delivered. 

Our finding: GY$400 million is not a valuation. It is a refund in full.

AN ASSET BUILT ON OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY

The Berbice River Bridge cost approximately GY$8 billion to construct between 2006 and 2008. The capital structure behind that construction has been a matter of public record for over a decade, and has never seriously been disputed even by the deal’s defenders: private equity accounted for only GY$400 million of the total — between five and sixteen percent of financing, depending on which year’s disclosure is consulted.

The remainder was debt and preferred stock, much of it underwritten by the state’s own National Insurance Scheme.

The original GY$400 million equity register read as follows: New GPC-Ramroop Group-Queens Atlantic held 40 percent (GY$160 million); Secure International Finance Company held 20 percent (GY$80 million); the National Insurance Scheme held 20 percent (GY$80 million) in ordinary equity, separate from its far larger preferred-share exposure; Hand-in-Hand Group held 10 percent (GY$40 million); and Demerara Contractors Limited held the remaining 10 percent (GY$40 million), a stake later absorbed by government through means this board could not independently verify from the public record.

By 2015, Kaieteur News had already documented the structural peculiarity that followed from this arrangement: equity holders controlling barely five percent of the company’s total financing exercised majority control of it, through a Special Share mechanism concentrated in the hands of two entities — New GPC, whose principal Dr. Ranjisinghi “Bobby” Ramroop was reported to have close relations to then-President Bharrat Jagdeo, and Hand-in-Hand Trust Corporation. Between them, these two entities controlled fifty percent of a company financed almost entirely by public and quasi-public debt.

That same year, then-Finance Minister Winston Jordan told the National Assembly that NIS had lost GY$1.8 billion on the bridge between 2009 and 2015 alone, on top of further investment he described on the record as “reckless” and “criminal.” A Finance Minister of Guyana called this company’s financial architecture criminal in Parliament. That assessment did not originate with this board, and it did not originate with an opposition critic with an axe to grind — it came from inside government, under a different administration, years before the wind-up now under examination.

TWENTY YEARS WAS THE DEAL

The Berbice Bridge Company’s concession ran twenty-one years from June 2006, under a Build-Own-Operate-Transfer structure. The entire premise of a BOOT arrangement is the transfer: private capital tolerates the risk of construction and early operation in exchange for a defined window of toll revenue, after which the asset reverts to the public that ultimately absorbed the risk of underwriting it. Multiple accounts of the concession’s terms — including a 2024 letter to Guyana Chronicle from a technocrat who worked on the bridge’s original execution under the Jagdeo presidency — place reversion at 2027 or 2028. The company’s own public messaging has never disputed this.

In October 2018, BBCI tested the limits of that arrangement. Facing government resistance to a proposed 265 percent toll increase, the company offered a trade: withdraw the toll hike in exchange for a nineteen-year extension of the concession, effectively doubling its life to 2045. Then-Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo did not equivocate. “That bridge is supposed to come back to us — government — free of cost in twenty years,” he told a press conference. “To give it back to the shareholders for another twenty years, it’s unbelievable.” He called the extension request unjustifiable and the company’s toll increase indefensible, and he separately criticized the Patterson-era government’s unilateral seizure of bridge operations as “nothing but political” — a position that, taken as a whole, reflects a man who considered both the company’s shareholders and the government of the day capable of treating the bridge as a political instrument rather than public infrastructure.

The extension was never granted. The concession’s clock kept running.

2026: THE YEAR THE BRIDGE WAS OWED TO GUYANA

Eight years after Jagdeo insisted the bridge would revert “free of cost,” and in the very window multiple sources place as the concession’s natural expiry, his government — with Jagdeo now serving as Vice President — paid the shareholders of that same company GY$400 million rather than allow the concession to lapse.

The defense offered in advance, by government-aligned commentator Joel Bhagwandin in a February 17, 2026 letter published across Guyana Times and iNews, is instructive less for what it argues than for what it inadvertently concedes. Bhagwandin’s case for acquisition rests on a comparison between the cost of continued toll subsidy and the cost of retiring the company’s debt and settling shareholder claims. It is a defensible economic argument in the abstract. But Bhagwandin himself states, in his own letter, that he is working “without the benefit of the most recent financial statements (2024 or 2025)” — falling back instead on 2020 figures, which he acknowledges do not reflect the company’s actual recent performance. A defender of the acquisition, writing seven months before government paid a single dollar, had no current financial statements to work from.

Nor does Bhagwandin’s own arithmetic produce GY$400 million. His model contemplates retiring roughly GY$5 billion in company debt (as of the 2020 statements), settling preference shares, and negotiating a residual “terminal payment” to common shareholders whose position he describes as weakened by an accumulated deficit of some GY$1.65 billion. That is not a model that outputs a clean GY$400 million payment to shareholders. It is a model for a considerably more complicated settlement — one this board has found no public evidence was ever actually conducted.

New GPC—Ramroop’s GY$160 million, Secure International’s GY$80 million, NIS’s GY$80 million, Hand-in-Hand’s GY$40 million, and the remaining GY$40 million once held by Demerara Contractors Limited(NICIL). Eighteen years of toll revenue, extracted from Guyanese motorists at rates this newsroom’s readers will recall as the highest of any bridge crossing in the country, appear nowhere in the final number. Neither does any independent assessment of what a 1.57-kilometre floating bridge — however aged, however soon to be superseded by the new high-span crossing already under procurement — might actually be worth in 2026.

WHO WAS PAID, AND WHO DECIDED

No Cabinet paper on this transaction has been made public. No National Procurement and Tender Administration Board notice has surfaced. No independent valuator  or auditor has been named in connection with the GY$400 million figure, by government, by BBCI, or by liquidator Motilall. The formula Minister Edghill has previously described to the National Assembly — compensation “based upon their monthly operational expenses” — governed the toll subsidies paid to the company in 2025 and 2026, not the terminal wind-up payment now confirmed by Cheong. That formula, too, has never been published.

This board does not allege that any individual named in this piece acted with corrupt intent; we have not seen evidence that would support such a charge, and we do not print what we cannot support. What we can state, on the public record, is this:

The question this newsroom will continue to press, to the Ministry of Public Works, to the Ministry of Finance, and to liquidator Motilall, is the one the government has not yet answered: who decided GY$400 million was the right number, and by what method did they arrive at it?

Until that question is answered, the public is entitled to draw its own conclusion from the arithmetic government has left on the table.

— The Board